CASE STUDY

WhyHunger Scales Up with EveryAction

group of girls watering plants
WhyHunger logo

About

WhyHunger is a global nonprofit founded in 1975 on the fundamental belief that access to nutritious food is a human right and hunger is a solvable problem. WhyHunger provides critical resources to support grassroots movements and fuels community solutions to hunger rooted in social, environmental, racial, and economic justice. For more than 46 years, they have been building a broad-based movement led by the grassroots to change the systems, policies and institutions that perpetuate hunger and poverty in our world.
 

Background & Objectives

WhyHunger has invested heavily in cultivating strong relationships with their donors and developing a robust storytelling practice to help communicate the importance and urgency of supporting their unique, long-term work addressing the root causes of hunger (in addition to immediate hunger solutions such as local food banks). Their legacy Development tools were no longer adequately supporting the needs of their growing programs, and they began searching for a technology partner which would support increased access to data for their whole fundraising team while allowing for more personalization and multi-channel communication with donors.

Initiatives

Migrating to EveryAction meant moving 46 years of donor data from a clunky and complicated legacy software and starting to transition toward a system that their whole team could use. 2019 had been a difficult fundraising year, and WhyHunger’s Development team was ready for a fresh start. Ultimately, they made the switch just in time. The COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 brought conversations about the intersectional nature of social justice to the forefront for many new and current donors, and WhyHunger saw a huge influx of support. Director of Development Sharon Damelio points out, “We’ve had the message and framework for decades, and now we had the right infrastructure and right tools to scale up.”

Using EveryAction’s ability for deep segmentation, automation, and analytics, WhyHunger is able to build email programs to engage and retain hundreds of new donors who joined the organization during 2020. Functionality including ticketed events, drag and drop email templates, and donor self-service pages has been critical for both ensuring positive donor experiences and maintaining clean and accurate data within one database. EveryAction’s open API allowed WhyHunger’s developers to build a custom integration with Shopify, meaning that the data from over a million dollars raised through their annual Hungerthon campaign went straight into their database, rather than requiring hours of work doing manual data hygiene and uploads as it had in their previous system.

 

man and woman preparing corn to cook

Finally, EveryAction’s thorough onboarding trainings, library of product videos, and reliable support team staffed by many former nonprofit practitioners have made the difference for their team. “We love EveryAction, and we love the people that work at EveryAction because most of them have worked at nonprofits before and understand what the tools are really about. Our Account Executive even offered to volunteer on our hunger hotline during COVID,” says Damelio.

Results

With the right tools and infrastructure to support their work during an unprecedented year of both extreme need and extreme generosity, WhyHunger’s fundraising team has expanded individual giving, stewarded major gifts, and deepened relationships with institutional funders and seen transformative results that show no signs of slowing down. Since migrating to EveryAction in 2019, WhyHunger is on the path to tripling their revenue in 3 years.

With accessible donor management tools, it is easier than ever for WhyHunger to empower their entire team to perform their best when it comes to donor acquisition, retention, and cultivation. As Damelio notes, “Everyone had a login to our legacy tools, but no one wanted to touch them. Now our entire team is trained to use EveryAction, and I could even see our ED logging in and looking at a dashboard that she loves.”

$0+ million
WhyHunger’s revenue doubled from 3 million to over 6 million from 2019 to 2020
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$0+ million
Continued exponential revenue growth, with over 7 million raised in Q1 & 2 of 2021
WhyHunger protestors marching down a street
0%
Increase in individual giving
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0%
Increase in sustainers
woman working at a fulfillment center
Sharon Damelio, Director of Development

“EveryAction is the first donor CRM company I've ever used that felt like partners in the work—partnership of people who really understand not just what the functionality is for, but why it matters. Their focus is on our mission, who we are and what the money we raised is really for, and why people are choosing to give it. Everything we talk about and do together has a shared sense of mission and purpose that I haven't found anywhere else.”

Want to see it for yourself?

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